What do you do after you've done the Great Loop in a 39-foot trawler? In 2008, Scott and Mary Coles had just completed that dream cruise. Five years of planning and execution, it was a 6,700-nautical-mile voyage in their Mainship 390 trawler along North America's great inland waterways - the Hudson River, the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, the Intracoastal Waterway and others.

It was three days after Christmas in 2005, and Dave Bronson, with a small crew of family and friends, was running south of Oregon Inlet in his 25-foot walkaround, looking for a good spot to wet the lines and start the day.

Suddenly a "cyclone of birds" formed ahead. "I was the first on the scene and began working baits around a mass of feeding stripers," recalls the 49-year-old pharmaceutical research scientist from Apex, N.C.